Multicasting over Emerging 5G Networks: Challenges and Perspectives

The number and variety of mobile multicast applications are growing at an unprecedented and unanticipated pace. Mobile network providers are in front of a dramatic increase in multicast traffic load, and this growth is forecasted to continue in fifth-generation (5G) networks. The major challenges come from the fact that multicast traffic not only targets groups of end-user devices; it also involves machine-type communications (MTC) for the Internet of Things (IoT). The increase in the MTC load, predicted for 5G, calls into question the effectiveness of the current multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS). The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of 5G challenges in the view of effective management of multicast applications, and to identify how to enhance the mobile network architecture to enable multicast applications in future 5G scenarios. By accounting for the presence of both human and machine-related traffic, strengths and weaknesses of the state-of-the-art achievements in multicasting are critically analyzed to provide guidelines for future research on 5G networks and more conscious design choices.